The dialogue between music, poetry, and prose.

As some of you know, I spent last weekend at a Folk Festival, dossing about like an old hippy and generally enjoying myself. There was singing, and dancing, and storytelling. Some of the songs were new, some of the stories were old ...

And that got me thinking. I wonder how many of you have come across Les Barker. Click here for an extract of his work (those of you outside the UK, or who have never come across the shipping forecast, might struggle to understand in his first poem - fast forward, there is more). He has retired now, but used to appear with a small band called Mrs Ackroyd - who are still setting his poems to music and appearing at festivals (I couldn't find a link with clear diction, and most of the humour is in the wordplay) and are equally funny.

The point? The line between his poetry and the songs are often blurred. I have heard him speak his lines while a chorus sings behind him. And some of his poems melt into stories. This weekend I heard Ursula Holden Gill for the first time - she's a storyteller, who punctuates her performance with clog dances and songs. Her stories are poetic - such is the lyricism of her writing.

So where does song end and poetry begin? Or poems end and story begin?  And does it matter?

No - I would argue that it doesn't. Not in those early, primitive, playing-with-ideas days.

I know - publishers need to slot us into genres. It makes life easier for the marketing gurus. And, if we're chasing sales, then we have to attend to that eventually.

But creativity is different. It begins outside genre boxes, comes from unexpected places that can't be always be slotted into neat categories. We should be able to celebrate such creativity, to play with it, before putting on our sensible hat and thinking about the confines of genre.

And long may the festivals offer platforms to people whose work defies categorisation. (Or are you a planner - who begins with genre and works outwards from there? I'd love to hear a different point of view.)

A bit of song and dance.

I spent the Bank Holiday at Chippenham Folk Festival. Not to avoid the Jubilee, but because it's how I always spend the late May Bank Holiday.

Some people spend the summer going from festival to festival. Every Friday they pack tents and sleeping bags, dancing kit, fiddles and accordions, and trek off to Towersey or Warwick or Cambridge. I go to just one - that's knackering enough.

Some of you may have seen Jenny Woolf's post about morris dancing (see the link here), with some great clips of dancers in all their finery. What, I wonder, do all those people do in real life? When the boots and bells are packed away, the beards trimmed, flowers plucked from hair - are they accountants? Plumbers? Nursery nurses?

And those of us singing our hearts out? This year saw me joining the chorus of: 'What can you give a nudist for his birthday?', (first sung by Gracie Field - the original is here - so you can seen how flexible the word 'folk' is used) with the same enthusiasm I recently poured into singing Zadok the Priest with a local choir. A couple of years ago I caught myself singing, 'Oh, I'm a one-eyed cormorant looking for a shag!' (sorry, it's not on youtube) and tried to connect this singing woman with the orthodox one who wanders round the supermarket and chooses between trout and salmon.

I love this disconnect. And it's possibly one of the things I love about travelling. That moment of standing a little outside myself and noticing - this is me, doing this thing, singing this song, climbing this mountain, looking for tigers. A multiple personality? No - facets of myself that I let out to play occasionally.

And you - do you go out and surprise yourself? Do you enjoy that 'bloody hell, this is me' moment, or does it send you scuttling home for tea and cake? (Sometimes I do the cake thing sometimes, too!)